The tunnel did not open into emptiness.

  Seris staggered forward and stopped short, breath ripping painfully from her lungs as the Deadlands unfolded before her. It was not what she had expected at all. It wasn't barren or dry. It certainly wasn't the desolate waste she had imagined from maps and whispers and Empire propaganda.

  This place was inhabited.

  A vast plain stretched outward beneath a sky the color of old bruises, clouds hanging low and unmoving, like something pressed down by weight rather than weather. The ground was pale and uneven, layered with crushed bone and chalky stone that crunched softly beneath her boots. Rib fragments jutted from the earth like bleached roots. Vertebrae had been stacked into low walls and markers, deliberate and careful, as if someone had once taken the time to arrange the dead properly.

  There were roads.

  That was the first thing that made her stomach turn.

  Wide processional paths cut through the plain, paved with fitted slabs of dark stone veined with marrow-white lines. They stretched toward distant shapes on the horizon, with spires, towers, structures too vast and too skeletal to be natural.

  And along those roads was movement. Movement and horror.

  Figures knelt in ordered rows, some wrapped in rotting cloaks, others bare to the cold air, skin greyed and tight over bone. Some were not fully dead. Some were. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. As soon as they noticed Seris and the Bone Harrower walking through, they gasped and instantly bowed, foreheads pressing to the ground, spines folding in practiced reverence.

  No one spoke. The silence didn't feel empty though, the tension that lived in these lands filled it to the brim. Seris’s heart hammered so violently she was certain they would hear it. She took an unconscious step back, boot scraping bone.

  The sound echoed.

  Heads lifted.

  Eyes. Too many eyes. They all turned to look at her, staring deep down into her soul. The sensation itself slammed into her like a physical force. But what followed was more horrifying.

  Hunger. Human.

  The word did not sound in her mind, but she felt it ripple outward, passing from one watcher to the next like a scent carried on wind. Before she could breathe, scream or run, shadows surged.

  They wrapped around her in a single, seamless motion; cool and dense, swallowing her outline, her warmth, her presence. The world dimmed, sound muffling as though she had been plunged underwater. Even her heartbeat dulled, fading into something distant and indistinct.

  She gasped. The Bone Harrower had not touched her, but instead had claimed the space around her.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The watchers froze.

  Then, as one, they bowed lower. Deeper. Some pressed their faces into the ground until bone and stone cut skin. Others drew symbols over their chests, jagged gestures made with fingers missing joints.

  A whisper spread, carried on a hundred dead throats.

  “The Harrower walks.”

  Seris’s knees threatened to give out.

  He moved forward, unhurried, and the Deadlands parted for him. Every presence leaned away, making space as he walked. Reverence flowed ahead of him like a tide. Seris stayed close, swallowed by shadow, her fear vibrating uselessly against the veil he had drawn over her.

  “What… is this place?” she whispered, the words barely forming past the pressure in her chest.

  The Deadlands, he answered.

  As if that explained everything.

  They walked. But the further they went, the worse it became.

  Altars rose beside the roads, piles of femurs lashed together with blackened wire, skulls arranged in careful spirals. Offerings lay stacked at their bases: weapons, armour, severed hands clutching nothing, fresh bodies laid out with reverent precision.

  Some still breathed.

  Seris’s vision blurred. “They’re alive,” she murmured, her palms sweating in fear.

  They will not be for long.

  She gagged, bile burning her throat. “They’re giving you people.”

  He did not look at her.

  They bring what they owe.

  “What... what do you do with them?”

  What do you think? I accept what is given.

  The simplicity of it terrified her more than any cruelty would have.

  They passed a group kneeling apart from the others, men and women in Empire colors, uniforms stripped of insignia, eyes wide and shining with something like devotion. One crawled forward as the Bone Harrower approached, pressing a dagger into the dirt with trembling hands and bowing until his forehead bled.

  “Take me,” the man whispered hoarsely. “Let me serve.”

  The shadows brushed over him.

  He went still.

  Seris did not see what happened beneath the veil, but she felt it; life extinguished with quiet finality, the offering consumed not violently, but completely.

  Her breath hitched. Panic clawed its way up her spine, sharp and uncontrollable.

  “This is wrong,” she whispered. “This is... gods, this is... is this what you're going to do to me?”

  You are alive because I allow it.

  The words were not a threat.

  They were a fact.

  The ground sloped upward ahead, the road narrowing as it led toward a distant rise. Beyond it, she could see the silhouette of a city, if it could be called that. There lay jagged towers of bone and black stone fused together, glowing faintly from within with dark, red light. Monumental gates arched upward like rib cages, their teeth interlocked.

  A necropolis.

  A court.

  Seris’s terror spiked into something wild and irrational. She could not go there. Could not be brought before that many dead things. She turned suddenly, shadows rippling with her movement, and bolted back toward the road behind them.

  She made it one step.

  But the ground locked beneath her feet.

  Her body froze mid-motion, muscles screaming uselessly as the world held her in place. The shadows tightened, pressing her gently, but inexorably, back into alignment beside him.

  You do not flee from my domain.

  Tears burned her eyes. “Let me go,” she choked. “Please—I won't die. I won't.”

  No.

  The word settled into her bones.

  You will die. You would not survive it.

  She sagged, strength draining out of her as reality closed in. The Deadlands were not a place she could run from. They were a system. A hierarchy. A living empire of death.

  And at its centre walked the Bone Harrower.

  They crested the rise. The full city revealed itself below, vast, sprawling, and impossibly old. Processions moved through its streets. Bells made from skulls tolled slowly, each sound resonating through Seris’s chest like a second heartbeat.

  Every figure turned as he approached.

  Every knee bent.

  Even the monsters bowed.

  The shadows tightened once more around Seris, sealing her from view as the gates began to open.

  Welcome home, he smiled.